Hiding in the Pages: Great Summer Countdown Blitz: Day 9--Rising Tide: Dark Innocence by Claudette Melanson

Claudette Melanson writes & edits in Guelph, Ontario, with her husband Ron and four bun babies: Tegan, Pepper, Butters & Beckett. She graduated from Indiana University of Pennsylvania with a BA in English and an MA in Literature. She's wished to be a Vampire since age five. She hopes to one day work full time as an author, since there are many, many books living inside her head.

In her spare time she enjoys watching Japanese Anime and reading vampire stories....along with other great fiction. She is also very interested in good health and is an advocate of Ketogenic eating, using whole and natural foods. Her favorite foods are bulletproof coffee, cashew flour crust pizza and treats made with xylitol and almond, coconut or cashew flours.

Future dreams include writing many more books and spending more time with her son Jacob. Her biggest dream is to make Universal Halloween Horror Nights a yearly event with hubby and son. A Rabbit Rescue fanatic, she also hopes to help rescues all over the world save many innocent lives.

Q&A With the Author:
1- When did you know you wanted to write books? From about age five. I would always narrate things in my brain—all the things around me. I used to make up stories about people I’d see all the time. I even wrote a continuing story for my dance class that the teacher would read at the beginning of class every week.

2- What does your writing process look like? The past year I’ve been doing a lot of editing for other authors. But that has kept me from writing. I intend for next year to be spent, predominantly, writing. It’s very sporadic right now, whenever I can fit it in, but I want it to become more of a fixed schedule. I like to write with music on or a horror movie on in the background, and also watching my bunbabies at play.

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Could Maura's life get any worse? ...turns out it most certainly can.

Isolated and sheltered by her lonely mother, Maura's never been able to make friends. She seems to drive her classmates away—except for the odd times they pay enough attention to torture her—but she doesn’t understand why. Maura considers herself to be a freak of nature, with her unusually pale skin and an aversion to the sun that renders her violently nauseous. Her belief is only worsened by the fact that almost everyone around her keeps their distance.

Even her own father deserted her before she was born, leaving Maura alone with her emotionally distant mother, Caelyn. Even though Maura is desperate for answers about her unknown parent, Caelyn remains heartbroken and her daughter can’t bring herself to reopen her mother’s wounds. Or is there a more sinister reason Caelyn refuses to utter a word about her long-lost love?

When a cruel prank nearly claims Maura’s life, one of her classmates, Ron, rushes to her rescue. Darkly handsome & mysteriously accepting, Ron doesn’t seem to want to stay away, but Maura is reluctant to get too close, since her mother has announced she’s moving the two of them to Vancouver…nearly 3,000 miles away from their hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania.

If life wasn’t already challenging enough, Maura begins to experience bizarre, physical changes her mother seems hell bent on ignoring, compelling Maura to fear for her own life. Vicious nightmares, blood cravings, failing health and the heart-shattering loss of Ron—as well as the discovery of a tangled web of her own mother's lies—become obstacles in Maura's desperate quest for the unfathomable truth she was never prepared to uncover.

Awards

2015 Readers' Favorite Gold Medal Winner for YA Mystery

2015 RONE Award Finalist for YA Paranormal

2015 New Apple Top Medalist for Young Adult Ebook

Chosen as one of 400 for the second round of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for 2014!!!

Rising Tide will sink its fangs into you, keeping you awake into the wee hours of the night

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Author Top Ten List:

1. I have four housebunnies, who are spoiled to death. They have their own room, filled with toys, off the living room. Tegan, Pepper, Butters & Beckett.

2. In college, I lived in a haunted house. The ghost would turn the light on (light bulb with a chain) in the front closet every night at 9:00 PM. No one would ever believe me until they saw it. It moved other things around too in a non-harmful way.

3. When I was little, I was obsessed with Dinosaurs and used to have this little plastic set I played with all the time.

4. Eating gluten makes my Rheumatoid Arthritis go crazy, so I make all my cookies, cake and pizza dough with nut flours and can make pretty much anything you could make out of regular flour. Believe me when I say diet is what controls disease. I laughed at my naturopath when she first told me this, but then had to admit how wrong I was.

5. My favorite colors are red and black…together. I don’t have a single favorite, must be those two together. I try to make as much of my wardrobe as possible in these colors.

6. In college, I was in every club the English department had and between them and studying, had no free time. But they were nice enough my senior year to name an award after me, which they continued to give every year.

7. I wanted to write a book since the age of five, but once, I wrote a story for a Star Wars competition. My mother was so critical, I rewrote it (and the second one sucked), completely . I was nervous after that, and it took me six years to finish my first book, in large part because of that incident.

8. I can be competitive, especially when someone is mean to me. I took an idea to one of my English clubs in college for the upcoming alcohol-free mix off. One of the girls said it was stupid in a very snarky way, so I went to a different club. We did a whole Death’s Angst theme and even wrote a poem about how Death felt cheated, since no one was driving drunk that night. We had a little graveyard with names on the stones like, “Danny Drovedrunk.” We took Best of Show with the huge trophy, and the college kept our poem to use at future mix offs, since we’d followed the message they were trying to get across so well.

9. It’s my dream to move to Whitehorse in the Yukon Territories in Canada. I moved to Ontario from Vancouver when I met my husband and hate living here. I regret leaving the beauty of the west behind and hope next year to be living in this place, which is so beautiful and offers so much more opportunity. I think it would offer so much more writing inspiration too. Northern Lights are one thing I haven’t experienced yet that I’m dying to see in person. Plus, I love snow, so it’s a win-win.

10. I was a breech baby when I was born, and almost killed both myself and my mother at birth. The doctor let me go too far for surgery and she ended up being in labor for over 48 hours. Perhaps it was this early brush with near death that gave me such a love of the macabre.